Modern technology has made possible the digital encoding of audio and image information. Examples of audio information that may be digitally encoded include music, speech and sound effects. Image information may be roughly divided into still images and moving images (hereafter “video”). Image information that may be digitally encoded includes photographs, paintings, trademarks, product logos, designs, drawings and so on. Video information that may be digitally encoded includes movies, news and entertainment television programming, home videos and the like. Audio and image information may be digitally encoded when initially recorded or may be initially recorded in an analog format and later converted to a digital format. Digital information is relatively easy to store, retrieve, manipulate, reproduce and distribute. Digitized information can, for example, be easily stored and accessed on a personal computer, and computers can be interconnected to one another for data transmission by a network. A network may interconnect, for example, computers located in a particular building or in a particular geographical area. The Internet is a well-known example of a worldwide computer network.
Computer networks such as the Internet may be conceptually thought of as a software interface that facilitates the storage of, the search for and the transfer of information on the Internet. The advent of the Internet has made possible the creation of a large number of linked commercial and noncommercial network presences, e.g., web-sites and cross-links maintained on host computers connected to the Internet. Each network presence may include, for example, digitized audio and image information (e.g., stored in “media files”) and hypermedia-based documents that Internet users can readily access using a software program frequently referred to as a “browser”. The Internet may be also be conceptually thought of as, in essence, a collection of linked databases distributed throughout the network that are accessible to all users (or some users, in the case of, for example, password protected network presences) of the network.
A large body of audio and image information is currently available on the Internet and this body of information is constantly changing as, for example, new network presences, e.g., web sites, come into the existence and as new files are added to the existing network presences. While the abundance of currently available audio and image information and the ease of duplicating and transmitting the same provide enormous potential benefits, this abundance also gives rise to several problems. For example, the usefulness on this information is limited because there is often no way to locate media files that have a particular media content. Furthermore, the ease of copying and distributing media files has also greatly exacerbated the problem of media piracy. There is, for example a growing level of piracy of copyright protected media files on the Internet. Copyrighted material and other proprietary material is being replicated and distributed over the Internet without permission, for both personal and commercial use.
Pirated media files stored on network presences can be downloaded as streaming media content for viewing and/or listening (i.e., “playing”) in real-time or may be downloaded and stored on the computer of the person accessing the pirating network presence for playing and/or for further copying and redistribution at a later time. Nework presences offering pirated media may be commercial or non-commercial (sometimes called “free” sites). Recently, Internet services such as Napster™ and Gnutella™ have arisen that facilitate peer-to-peer protocols to enable transfer of copied media files between individual Internet users. Therefore, media content owners are increasingly concerned a piracy of their intellectual property over the Internet.
Moreover, managing and tracking the distribution of media files becomes increasingly difficult with the large number of mechanisms for disseminating the media and the increasing number of pathways that the dissemination may follow.